“I know this has been a stressful holiday, but, in a way, having nothing reminds us how lucky we really are.” – Marge Simpson
“What?” – Lisa Simpson
“We still have each other. And isn’t that the best gift of all?” – Marge Simpson
“But we would’ve had each other anyway.” – Lisa Simpson
“Yeah, plus lots of other stuff.” – Bart Simpson
I’m on record as saying that the sign gags are one of the few things Zombie Simpsons can still manage to do well. But if there’s one thing Zombie Simpsons knows how to do, it’s take something decent and destroy it completely through repetition and overuse, and thus “White Christmas Blues” was born. That video game scene where they spent half a minute throwing jokey titles at the screen was a masterpiece of taking something that kinda works and totally obliterating it. By the third or fourth batch, it became apparent that, yup, they were going to empty that whole shelf, and who cares if it amounts to pausing the episode for thirty seconds to give us all a reading test?
What passed for the story wasn’t any better. Sure, there might be something decent with “other family spends Christmas with the Simpsons”, but instead of that they crammed in an excess of character-less characters and had Marge patiently explain everything that was happening while it was happening. Also, there were weird, one-off scenes with Milhouse and Lovejoy and Lisa, who apparently forgot who her brother was. I’ve said this before, but sketch comedy shows often have better inter-scene continuity than Zombie Simpsons.
- Once again, the opening is rather good. Sure it’s yet another transparent attempt to kill clock (checking in at 90 seconds will do that), but it’s cute in several places and even has a couple of decent sign gags.
- The Itchy & Scratchy wasn’t bad, right up until Krusty started telling us what’s going on.
- It’s the only town with snow . . . which they’ve now told us three times.
- Marge’s listing of the out of state license plates wasn’t terrible, except for the fact that she was listing them instead of the show, you know, showing them to us.
- Okay, so they get paid three hundred bucks a night to let these people in their house because they can’t afford Christmas. That’s fine. Why, one fucking scene later, does Marge have to say this, “This is a great thing. We’re helping people celebrate Christmas and we’ll be able to afford Christmas.” Do we get to see them spend the money? Or see how having that extra cash lets them celebrate Christmas? Nope. We just get told.
- The hotel Jesus montage was a thing.
- Some of the Christmas movie titles were good, but twenty+ was Hedonism-bot excessive.
- Oh, man, this Lovejoy sermon scene is just awful. Remember when he asked people not to shout things out in the church? Long time ago, that.
- And the bed and breakfast thing has gotten quickly out of hand, with apparently multiple families having shown up for no discernible reason.
- What was with this? “Nothing is easy to wrap! I have trouble with scissors!” Does Yeardley Smith wince inside when they have Lisa say things like that?
- And then Flanders is there to explain the true meaning of Christmas before wandering off.
- The carols going on after the credits was repetitive and pointless.
- And there’s the license plates, because decent jokes must be overused. It’s the law.
Anyway, the ratings are in and they don’t suck for once because of a late football game that went down to the wire (Dear Dallas Cowboys, Thanks for all the laughs. Sincerely, Everyone Else). The preliminary numbers indicate that 8.38 million people wished they were watching one of the show’s other Christmas episodes last night. That’s by far the highest of the season, and will probably remain so even after that number is inevitably revised down to reflect all the people who turned their sets off right after Dallas finished imploding.
